


Burning Sand, Blazing Stars

by MrRhapsodist



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Introspection, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Star Wars: A New Hope, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 19:53:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19216378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrRhapsodist/pseuds/MrRhapsodist
Summary: Luke Skywalker, Hero of the Battle of Yavin, can't sleep. It's been weeks since he blew up the Death Star, and he's still not ready. He wasn't trained for any of this.He still sees their faces burning.Someone he knows can relate, all too well.





	Burning Sand, Blazing Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, hey, it's another Star Wars story. I had a flash of Luke suffering PTSD after Yavin, and I knew I had to write this down. It could be an inspiration for more stories, or a one-shot. Either way, hope you all like it!

When he sleeps, Luke can still see them burning.

He stands once more on the sands outside his family homestead. Outside what used to be his family homestead. What the Empire has now reduced to smoking ash and rubble with a few blasts from a laser cannon. And there, lying and smoldering beside the wreckage, are two bodies. Two blackened, charred corpses that can’t be called human anymore. Because if he did, if Luke even tried to call them human, he’d have to face the truth. To realize that everything he’s loved and cared for and argued with, everything he’s struggled with all his life...

That it’s all gone now. That they’re just... _gone._

And it’s his fault, taking the droids. It’s his fault, getting involved in the Rebellion, getting in the Empire’s crosshairs, even daring to dream of leaving that miserable dustball of a planet in the first place. Their blackened, charred faces scream out at him from the void, forcing Luke to his knees, weeping bitterly as their condemnation grows louder, ever louder—

And then he wakes up. Tangled sheets, drenched in sweat, and his hands gripping the sides of his head. Luke Skywalker stares for a long time, remembering how to breathe.

* * *

He’s not alone.

He sits in cold steel barracks, a passenger compartment on some Mon Calamari star cruiser. The _Dauntless,_ he recalls. It’s been days—no, weeks—since Yavin 4. Weeks since the Death Star’s destruction, since losing Biggs and Red Leader, since the joyous celebration and the harried evacuation as an Imperial armada arrived in orbit. Luke processes all of this as he untangles himself from the bedsheets and pulls on his orange flight suit. He looks around at the still-sleeping pilots and soldiers on the bunks around him.

Some of them, like Wedge and Tycho and Wes, are friends. Others are strangers to him, but there’s an unspoken connection. The kind of bond that being in a war and on the run can bring about between men and women, even among those of different species.

Luke quietly makes his way out of the barracks. He places a hand along one of the bulkheads and feels his way down the half-lit corridor. They’re on a nocturnal rotation shift, and judging by a glance through a nearby viewport, the ship is drifting between star systems. Nothing but cold, hard void greets Luke on his way out of the pilots’ quarters.

For a long time, he doesn’t have a direction. He could head over to the hangar bay. Find Han and Chewbacca, see if they’re up for another round of sabacc or a few drinks. Han hardly sleeps, and Luke begins to wonder what keeps a man like that so energized all the time.

Sooner or later, Luke ends up at one of the mess halls on that level. Only service droids, domed and warbling like astromechs, are up and about at that shift. Luke catches one droid’s eye—well, its photoreceptor—and motions at a nearby bubbling canister on the wall.

The droid blinks its photoreceptor and whirrs away.

Minutes later, a cup of warm caf is pressed into Luke’s hands. He doesn’t drink it at first. The moment isn’t right. Instead, Luke holds the cup between his hands, staring into its murky depths. He savors the warmth through the ceramic cup, imagining for a moment that he’s back on the moisture farm on Tatooine, that he’s only now waking up from the dream he had about secret messages, a captured princess, and a man in black armor who cut down a kindly old wizard with his burning red sword.

Yessir, any moment now. He’ll wake up to Uncle Owen grousing about a collector panel that needs fine-tuning after the last sandstorm.

Any moment now...

When he stays onboard a Mon Calamari ship, Luke sighs and sips at the bitter caf. It doesn’t remind him of the stuff his Aunt Beru used to brew up, and for that, he’s grateful.

A gentle pair of footsteps from behind makes Luke turn around. When he does, he ducks his head and averts his eyes on instinct.

“What’s wrong?” Leia Organa sits down on the bench beside Luke. Her hair is no longer worn in a pair of rings, but braided and tied back into a bun. A sign of the times, he imagines, instead of the fancy diplomatic things she used to do as a princess. Her attire is less formal, too. She’s adopted the same brown-and-tan uniform as most of the Alliance soldiers Luke has seen. Her vest has an officer’s insignia, and it occurs to Luke that he doesn’t even know what rank Leia has in the Rebellion. Or if that even matters.

When she speaks, everyone listens. Even the most crusty, battle-scarred veteran on the team sits up and smiles at the sound of her voice.

Luke almost feels ashamed for even daring to be moping around.

“It’s nothing,” he lies. After a moment, he shrugs and sips at his caf. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Leia chuckles and shakes her head. “I know the feeling. Would you mind some company?”

“I...” Luke swallows. “L-look, I wouldn’t want to keep you away from anything important—”

“We’re stuck between Malastare and Ithor on an uncharted course.” Leia gestures with a flick of her wrist. “With the comm blackout underway, there’s not much to do but wait.”

“Oh. Right...” Luke shrinks back into himself. Hands wrapped protectively around his caf.

“So, what’s wrong?” Now the princess’s eyes are laser-focused on the side of his face. “I don’t need to be a Jedi to figure out _something’s_ bothering you.”

“You’d probably be a good one, though.” He tries for a smile, but Luke’s heart isn’t in it. He stares out at the mess hall, over to where the droids are busy wiping down tables and sorting ingredients for the morning meal shift. Seeing them work makes him feel better somehow. Like there’s still some semblance of order and justice in the universe.

“I have bad dreams, lately,” he finally says. Staring into his caf, Luke doesn’t see the blackened corpses anymore. All he sees are the burning sands, where the ash had landed from the wreckage of the farm. He still smells ash, still tastes it on his tongue. “Well, not just dreams. They’re real. They _happened,_ and I...” Luke shakes his head. “I don’t know. I feel like, now, after all the time we’ve been running and fighting, I just... I suddenly _feel_ it now. Like everything’s hitting me...”

He’s rambling, and he hates himself for doing it. But Leia doesn’t upbraid him. She sits patiently and she nods. When he looks at her, Luke catches the princess smiling.

She touches his shoulder, and her touch is electric. Yet also familiar. Luke doesn’t understand why that is. It’s like he’s known her all his life, even though they were born on different worlds, an entire _galaxy_ apart. But it took a battered pair of droids who came out of a space battle to bring them together, and Luke doesn’t question such oddities after that. He smiles back, and he puts his hand over Leia’s, amazed that she doesn’t push him away for being so forward.

He’s a farmboy, and she’s a princess. It’d never work between them. Not like _that._

“You needed time,” Leia says, her voice low and gentle. “I get it. I did, too.”

“Your people...” Luke doesn’t dare look at her. He’s remembering Obi-Wan’s face in the main hold of the _Falcon,_ when a grimace passed over the Jedi Knight’s weathered features. Like he’d aged ten years in an instant.

Luke had lost his family. Leia had lost an entire _world._

How could anyone survive that? How could she keep going? He shuddered to think of what screams and hellish visions she might have relived, night after lonely night.

But Leia’s sorrow is a momentary flash across her face. Downcast eyes and pressed lips. When she looks back up, her jaw is set in a hard line. Luke suddenly sees the Rebel leader in action, the woman who can bark out orders to soldiers and pilots twice her age, whose aim is true and swift, even under the worst storm of blasterfire. Not even the sight of a legion of stormtroopers makes her flinch.

“It’s never a mistake to mourn,” she tells Luke, turning to look over at the same droids he was watching before. “Alderaan is... gone. But it’s also right _here._ ” Leia touches a spot on her breast, and Luke can almost hear the heart beating underneath. “It’s never gone so long as I’m drawing a single breath. And every time I save another planet, every time we make the Empire _hurt,_ then it’s one more triumph for my people. For my father and my mother, for my real...”

Her voice trails off. Luke offers his hand, and Leia takes it with a squeeze.

They don’t say anything for a moment. They don’t have to.

Between the two of them, they finish off a single cup of bitter caf. Leia sees Luke back to his quarters. She gives him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek, and he manages to fall asleep again. Exhaustion overtakes him, and Luke sinks into a comfortable sleep with not a single dream to tear at his heart.

* * *

A standard week later, he bolts upright in bed again.

This time, Luke is fighting back tears. He’s pressing his face into his palms, trying to shut them out. To stop the _voices._ All those screams, all that dread, filling him up and spilling out like molten lead from a furnace. That elation, that sense of utter disbelief and triumph when he saw the battle station explode behind him—it’s all tarnished now. All because Luke can’t stop seeing the faces of men and women behind stormtrooper helmets and underneath officer’s caps, twisting into shouts of terror as their lives are burned away in an instant.

He breathes in slowly. Wet, ragged breaths fill the silence in the barracks.

If any of Luke’s comrades have similar dreams, they’ve either made their peace with the cost of war, or else they’re a pack of heavy sleepers.

He considers trying to go back to sleep, but those screams echo in the Force. They didn’t trouble Luke during the flight back to Yavin 4; he had a damaged Artoo-Detoo in his X-wing to consider. They didn’t overwhelm him during the evacuation; he was too busy trying to dodge green bolts of fire from some two dozen TIE fighters in the jungle moon sky. No, those screams come when he’s in the dead of night, surrounded by fellow soldiers in a war, and there’s no battle to fight.

They ambush him, springing up like Tusken Raiders from the dunes. Taking a gaderfii blow to the face would hurt less than the torment of hearing—feeling—those screams in his head.

Luke does everything by rote after waking up. He gets dressed, creeps out of the barracks, and begins his long, silent march down the corridor.

A Mon Calamari engineer in a black outfit passes by with hydrospanners in his webbed fingers. He gives Luke a head bob, the closest his species can get to a human’s nod, and Luke inclines his head in return. Once he’s alone in the hall again, Luke takes a moment and pauses by the same viewport outside the barracks.

Below the _Dauntless,_ a verdant Outer Rim world rotates ever so slowly. Luke never knew there was so much green in the universe. He sees cloud formations in its atmosphere, swirling with moisture that the farmers on Tatooine could only dream of harvesting, and he mentally traces the lines of continents and oceans below. The idea that there’s water on this planet—just sitting there—still amazes him. Luke considers it a miracle that he can still be amazed at some things. He never would imagine that he’d meet a real-life Wookiee, or that he’d leave Tatooine and pilot a starfighter, or that he could learn the ways of the Jedi Knights from old Ben Kenobi himself.

Luke never imagined that he’d spill so much blood.

He’s a hero. He knows this because of the celebrations and the cheers he got back at Base One. He knows this because he was promoted to Lieutenant in an instant, and he was assigned to the newly formed Rogue Squadron. But, in private moments, Luke doesn’t feel all that heroic.

Something reached _through_ him. When he switched off his targeting computer, when he heard old Ben’s voice in his head and felt the hum of the _Falcon_ ’s sublight engines behind him, Luke didn’t take the final shot. He let the Force take over, and the Force ensured the Death Star’s doom. Like watching a sandstorm on the horizon, scouring everything in its path.

Except that he’d let the storm loose.

A moment passes before Luke hears her coming again. This time, he doesn’t flinch or look away.

He spins around and faces Leia. His breath catches in his throat.

She’s been crying.

Luke doesn’t need to ask why. Somehow, she knows. It’s the same pain, written on her perfect face as clearly as it is on his heart. He doesn’t ask for permission when he wraps his arms around her, and he doesn’t freeze up when Leia hugs him back.

She doesn’t say who she’s crying for. Luke can only imagine the faces she sees in her sleep. The people she’s taken down with a blaster in hand. The friends she’s lost, her loving family and billions of innocent people annihilated in _seconds._ Luke isn’t trained for this. He was raised to be a farmhand, a loyal nephew to hardworking folks trying to scratch out a life out on the Jundland Wastes. But he doesn’t care, and he holds Leia close because he can do that much for her.

They hold on until they’ve cried it all out. All the memories of loss, all the blasterfire and charred faces and blackened bodies on burning sand. All the distant screams in the depths of space, screams that neither of them could hear but _felt_ in their bones.

Luke, this time, escorts Leia back to her quarters. She’s leaning into him, red-faced and sniffling, but stronger than before. Her grip on his arm is tight, and he feels the cadence in her step.

As the door slides open, Leia turns to him, her eyes bloodshot and grim.

“If you have any trouble,” she says, “you know my comm code.”

Luke nods. He takes her hand and squeezes it. “That offer goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

When she smiles, Leia fights back a sniffle. She wipes at her nose in an unladylike way, and she leans up to kiss Luke on the cheek.

“It’s a long war,” she tells him. “Thank the Force we’re not going it alone.”

Luke watches her duck back into her quarters, and the door slides shut between them. He pauses for a few seconds in the corridor, savoring the background hum of a Mon Calamari starship. In the Force, he can almost feel the swirl of emotions and thoughts from thousands of beings, both awake and asleep. He feels pangs of doubt, smoldering frustration, a few laughs between friends in the mess hall, and grim determination from the crew that’s keeping watch on all the ship’s vital systems.

The emotions come back to Luke, and he lets them pass through him. Like letting the Force take the shot at the Death Star. Like letting his trust in Obi-Wan lead him away from the ruined farm.

When he heads back to the barracks, his step is slow and purposeful. Luke sees himself back in the cockpit of an X-wing. He can already hear Artoo-Detoo whistling for his attention, can hear a light roar from Chewie, can see Han’s smirk as they head out for another battle. Another mission.

Back in the barracks, when Luke falls asleep, he sees burning sands that he’ll liberate. He sees blazing stars and imagines another world that he’ll fly over in his X-wing with the other Rebels. Thinking of Owen and Beru, of Obi-Wan Kenobi, of the people of Alderaan, of the Imperials whose lives he ended in a flash—they all blur together in the dark. All accounted for. Luke dreams of the throttle in his hand, and all he can see are the stars beckoning for him.


End file.
